Drawing the many faces of Nabokov’s Lolita

In his new book, Lolita – The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov novel in the Art and Design Genre, Nabokov expert Yuri Leving catalogues the work of eighty designers offering their on vision of the eponymous character from the Russian masterpiece.

The book Lolita –
The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's novel in the Art and Design
Genre, recently published in New York, showcases the work of eighty designers
offering their own vision of the eponymous character from the Russian
masterpiece. Yuri Leving, author of the book, analyzes the visual history of
the novel.

Nabokov was very
strict when it came to the visual range. What did he say about it? What was the
most important thing for him in the representation of the character, in print
and in the movie?

He was a student of the brilliant (Russian-Lithuanian
artist Mstislav, note of the editor) Dobuzhinsky, although not the most
diligent one. He could not stand abstract art. He once called Salvador Dali
“the twin brother of Norman Rockwell kidnapped by gypsies in his childhood”. At
a mature age, he adored comics. As for the movies, he preferred comedies.

In
private conversations, he would speak unflatteringly about the film adaptation
of Lolita made by Stanley Kubrick. He said that it was “made with the eyes of a
passenger lying in an ambulance.” However, he regarded the marketing of Lolita
by drawing girls in defiant postures a necessary evil that contributed to
successful sales – and in literary marketing, Nabokov had no equals.

What was
Nabokov's attitude to the attempts to “visualize” his text? Did he not consider
that the cover reduced Lolita to a single subject – sex?

Nabokov was totally against putting images of young
women on his book. However, subsequently, he treated the nymphets on the covers
of Lolita with a certain degree of leniency. He was amused by the French
Gallimard paperback edition – the front cover shows a farm girl with blond
pigtails, while on the back cover we see the back of her head, a neat parting
and the same two pigtails. Thus, the text of the novel is physically contained
in the head of the main character.

What did the
illustrators do in order to emphasize that this was about children's sexuality,
not about sexuality in general?

Only in North America, Lolita sells an average of
50,000 copies every year – the novel attracts readers no matter the cover.
Traces of infantile sexuality, from crushed candies to lipstick, (often
portrayed in the covers, note of the editor) are just a tribute to convention.

The illustrations of Nabokov’s works in men's magazine Playboy are a wonderful
example of this. In the 1960s the editorial office ordered some illustrations
from Robert Parker and Roland Ginzel for the translated version of his novels
Desperation and Voyeur, as well as for excerpts from Ada.

Nabokov’s harsh words
on the matter have been preserved, in one of the telegrams. He reprimanded the
artist for depicting Ada with an unrealistic bust, and advised him to take some
lessons in anatomy. In addition, he referred to the picture of the two lovers,
portrayed while passionately kissing in the night, as “two ugly frogs”.

A funny
thing happened to the work of famous book designer John Gall, ordered by the
respectable Random House. At first, Gall took a close-up of a woman’s lips and placed
them vertically on the cover of Lolita, in an image that, in a strong double
entendre, looked like a mouth and genitalia at the same time.

Reactions to this
bold move proved to be fully polarized – one of the editors became furious,
while the other asked for a copy of it and put it into a frame. In the end, the
book was published with these very lips, but in the horizontal position.

What is your
personal opinion concerning the Russian covers?

The vast majority of them are derivative models that
use already existing images – classic works of art, portrayals of tantalizing
nymphets and fragments of posters. A separate category of Russian covers
presents stills from the sets of the many Hollywood adaptations of the book.

For example, at the end of the last century, while the second screen version of
Nabokov's novel directed by Adrian Lyne enjoyed a peak of popularity, at least
six Russian publications with featuring images of Jeremy Irons and Dominique
Swain, the actors playing the main roles in the film, were released.

Related:

Interestingly, Lyne’s movie failed at the U.S. box office, mostly because
shortly before its release the U.S. Congress passed a law banning child
pornography – a move that scared off the distributors. Meanwhile in Yeltsin's
Russia, distributors were not worried at all.

The Russian publishers’ vision of Lolita coincided
with Russian author Sergey Dovlatov’s, who called Nabokov's heroine a “typical
Russian young lady”. She was often depicted as a girl in a sailor’s jacket or
against the background of Russian birch trees.

There were also some curious
cases – the 1997 edition of Lolita (in the series Russian Love Prose of the 20th
Century!) used a fascinating profile of a girl – a fragment from a poster from
the previous century promoting men's collars.

On the cover, we can see only the
woman's head taken out of context, but in the full version of the poster, its
creator, Joseph Leyendecker, focuses the viewer's attention on the man standing
behind the girl. The artist was gay.

Among the most inappropriate covers, one cannot ignore
the picture of a girl, taken from a canvas by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt,
which was picked for the 2000 edition of Lolita. The image was mockingly cut
off at the girl’s knees and had the logo of the Eksmo Publishing House placed
on the groin.

Similarly, it would have been inconceivable for a self-respecting
Western publisher to place a frontal nude photo of a teenage girl on the back
cover of its publication, as it happened with an edition by the Moscow
TF-Progress Publishing House. It was no pastiche or drawing, but a contemporary
photograph of a very distinctive underage naked girl – an element that
transferred the perception of the novel into a completely different register.

A good cover is an attempt at joint creation; it must
be bright and original in interpretation. However, the more complex the novel,
the harder it is for the artist to express the main idea of the work in a very
concentrated form, while at the same time making an artistic statement, and
pleasing both the publisher and the buyer in the competitive environment of a
constantly shrinking book market.

Lolita is a complex work, because it leaves
it to the readers to decide what to make of its characters, overcome the
aesthetic appeal of the text and understand the ethical maze (who do we
sympathize with – Lolita or Humbert? Who gets seduced first? What shall we do
with the vulgar, tacky world of Puritan America of the 1950s? – and the like).

The moral hesitation is incorporated directly into the text – like a
delayed-action mine. Thus, any attempt to visualize it is like playing with a
safety pin. It may explode or may pass over.

They passed a law
banning the promotion of pedophilia in St. Petersburg, Nabokov’s birthplace.
What are the prospects for editions of Lolita in St. Petersburg in connection
with this initiative?

I do not think that it would be a bad thing to impose
a moratorium on the publication of Lolita in Russia, and in the world at large.
When there is too much of one book, even the most brilliant work, certain
devaluation might happen. After a five-year break, I would publish Lolita in a
black cover with a thick supplement of comments.